Shearer reliability is considered as one of the most important indexes in longwall mining production. However, the traditional reliability methods are based on the specific distribution of the failure parameters, which are incongruent in the actual practice. Therefore, a novle shearer reliability prediction method based on support vector machine (SVM) with chaotic particle swarm optimization (CPSO) is proposed. It combines the advantages of the high accuracy of SVM and the fast convergence of CPSO, where the chaos idea is introduced to particle swarm optimization for the particle initialization, inertia weight coefficient optimizing and premature convergence treatment. Then this CPSO is used to select and optimize the important parameters of SVM. Ultimately, the optimized parameters are used to obtain a superior CPSO-SVM method for reliability prediction. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, two numerical comparisons are designed respectively using the literature data and the actual shearer data from the coal mine enterprise. The research results reveal the prediction accuracy and validity of the proposed method.